Neuroscience review reframes 'mind-wandering' and mental illness

Brain regions within the core default network subsystem (DNCORE) that are more active during task-unrelated thought than during task-related thought (credit: Kalina Christoff et al./Nature Reviews Neuroscience) In a review of neuroscience literature from more than 200 journals, published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, a University of British Columbia-led team has proposed a radical new framework for understanding "mind wandering" and mental illness. Within this framework, spontaneous thought processes -- including mind-wandering, creative thinking, and dreaming -- arise when thoughts are relatively free from deliberate and automatic constraints. Mind-wandering is not far from creative thinking. "We propose that mind-wandering isn't an odd quirk of the mind," said Kalina Christoff, Ph.D., the review's lead author and a professor of psychology at UBC. "Rather, it's something that the mind does when it enters into a spontaneous mode. Without this spontaneous mode, we couldn't do things like dream or think creatively."